Irresponsible Gun Owner of the Day: Gramps

The Seattle Times reports that an unidentified grandfather [not shown above] was shooting with his grandson Sunday when their .22 pistol jammed. According to the report, the man accidentally shot the boy in the stomach while trying to clear the gun. Can you count how many rules Gramps broke? Let’s see. For one, he pointed the gun at the kid. Assuming he didn’t intend to shoot him, that’s a really bad one to violate. Grandpa most likely lost focus while trying to de-jammify the .22. Gramps also had his finger on the trigger, another rule that’s always a good one to be scrupulous about. He managed to clear the gun alright. But when he did, he squeezed the trigger on the newly freed round. Again, you have to break at least two of the four rules for something really bad to happen. Keep that in mind and keep yourself out of the papers.

This could be a situation similar to Senator Klein’s (or at any rate, her version of what happened)–gramps thought he had the gun pointed in a safe direction, then grandson walks into where he had it pointed.

I won’t go so far as to call Cooper’s rules inadequate, but it seems to me that the safe direction rule has an implication that people don’t give enough thought to: a safe direction doesn’t necessarily remain a safe direction. So if you’re handling a gun, you need to pay attention to where it’s pointed, even if it was safe when you started pointing it there, particularly if there are ignorant/immature/irresponsible people in the area…like children or reporters.